It has long been my position that a real alternative to fiat money as a means of payment requires reclaiming the “credit commons,” i.e. establishing community control over credit. It is producers and sellers of real value who are the ones who are actually qualified to issue a currency into circulation. They can do so individually by using their own private voucher currencies redeemable for the goods and services they are ready, willing, and able to provide, or they can do it in cooperation with others by pooling their commitments and jointly issuing a common voucher currency. Such a currency can then circulate generally for other to use to pay one another instead of using dollars. Euros, pounds, or other government fiat currencies.
My paper titled, Invoice Factoring as the Basis for a Digital Token Currency, presented at the RAMICS Conference in Rome on November 6, 2024, describes how that can be achieved by creating a digital token currency that, unlike present-day crypto currencies, is based on, and redeemable for real goods and services. This presentation describes the structure, processes, and protocols for creating and circulating a digital voucher token currency on a continuous recurrent basis. I’ve summarized my proposal in this 12-minute video posted on YouTube.
Today, out of curiosity, I asked Copilot this question:
“How would E. C. Riegel organize the exchange of value among producers and intermediaries in the distribution process?”
Here is Copilots’ surprisingly accurate response to that question. It is, in effect, a brief summary of his book Private Enterprise Money.
E. C. Riegel envisioned a radically decentralized and voluntary system of value exchange that bypassed both government-issued money and centralized banking. His proposed framework, known as the Valun Exchange System, was designed to empower producers and intermediaries to coordinate trade through a self-regulated, non-political monetary mechanism.
Here’s how it would work in practice:
1. Voluntary Association of Producers: Producers and intermediaries would form a cooperative network called a Valun Exchange. Membership would be voluntary and based on mutual trust and creditworthiness.
2. Private Credit as Currency: Instead of using state-issued money, members would issue credit to one another in the form of Valun units. These units would be backed by the members’ productive capacity and promises to deliver goods or services—not by gold, fiat, or government decree.
3. Accounts, Not Cash: Transactions would be recorded as debits and credits in members’ accounts, similar to a mutual credit system. No physical currency would be needed; the system would operate through bookkeeping entries.
4. Intermediaries as Facilitators: Distributors, wholesalers, and retailers would participate as both buyers and sellers, using their Valun accounts to settle transactions. Their role would be to facilitate the flow of goods, not to extract value through speculative finance.
5. Self-Limiting Credit: A member’s ability to issue credit would be limited by their past performance and the confidence of the network. This would prevent inflation and ensure that credit was grounded in real economic activity.
6. No Interest, No Taxes: Since the system was private and voluntary, it would not involve interest-bearing loans or taxation. Riegel believed this would eliminate many distortions in the traditional monetary system.
In essence, Riegel’s model treated money not as a commodity or a government tool, but as a social contract among producers—a means of measuring and facilitating exchange based on trust and productivity. It was a bold attempt to return the power of money creation to the people actually producing value.
If you’d like, I can sketch out a visual flow of how this system would operate among producers, intermediaries, and consumers.
To that offer, I answered, “yes,” but in successive attempts Copilot failed to produce an accurate flow diagram. I have for many years been using my own diagram of credit flows in mutual credit clearing systems. Here it is below. If you substitute the word “valun” for “Currency vouchers,” this diagram shows exactly what Riegel was describing:
The “Trusted Producer” depicted in the upper right begins the process by using their line of credit to purchase something for an employee, supplier or contractor. Those credit vouchers then flow in the numbered sequence, the final step being when the Trusted Issuer accepts them back in payment for the goods or services they sell, thus completing the circuit of reciprocity. Note that at each step of the way, goods and services are circulating in the opposite direction to the voucher credits (or valuns).
I then pointed out to Copilot that it had failed to specify the units in which valun credits were to be denominated. This was its response:
Great point, Thomas. Riegel proposed that all debits and credits in his system would be denominated in a unit called the Valun—short for “value unit”. This was not just a name, but a deliberate attempt to establish a new standard of value independent of national currencies and political influence.
At the system’s launch, the Valun was intended to be roughly equivalent in purchasing power to the U.S. dollar, simply to ease adoption and pricing familiarity. However, over time, its value would be maintained internally by the productivity and trustworthiness of the network’s members, not by fiat or commodity backing.
So, in essence, every transaction—whether between producers, intermediaries, or consumers—would be recorded in Valuns, making it a closed-loop accounting system grounded in mutual credit and real economic activity.
Would you like a breakdown of how Valun pricing might work in practice, or how it could be stabilized over time?
I already knew how Riegel proposed to stabilize the Valun pricing unit, and I am not satisfied with it being adequate. I make my case in a document which Copilot cited as a source; it is contained in a previous post to my website, E. C. Riegel’s Valun Mutual Money Plan, but the reference was to a site other than my own. It would be better to read the original post on my site. That post contains the full text of the Valun Mutual Money Plan, together with my comments and critique. I believe that serious students would do well to read it.
The latest chapter in my new 2024 edition ofThe End of Money and the Future of Civilization, has now been published. Here is an excerpt:
The entirety of money, banking, and finance is comprised of claims and obligations. — Thomas H. Greco, Jr.
It was in a dusty old bookshop close to the British Museum in London that I discovered a slim volume that was to complete for me the picture of how money has evolved over time. I had been traveling in Europe and the United Kingdom in the summer of 2001 with my then partner, Donna, attending conferences, meeting with friends and cohorts, and enjoying the sights, sounds, and cultures of the Old World. It was actually Donna who discovered the book in the basement stacks and brought it to me, saying, “What about this one?” The book was The Meaning of Money by Hartley Withers. Although I had already been engaged in intensive research into the subjects of money and banking for more than twenty years and had written three books of my own on the subject, I had not previously heard of Withers, but it was evident that he must have been, in his day, a recognized authority on the subject, and that his book must have served for a long time as a leading text; I surmised that from the fact that the volume I held in my hands was the seventh edition, published in 1947, of a work first published in 1909, and that Withers had been the editor of The Economist magazine from 1916 to 1921. Reading Withers crystallized my understanding of the double transformation that money had undergone during the previous three hundred years, an understanding that afforded a clearer comprehension of the nature and significance of the changes that have taken place, an understanding that prepares the ground from which to launch the next great improvement in the exchange process.
For now, you can read or listen to the entire chapter at Future Brightly:
It will also be published soon here, and on my own Substack channel. Further chapters will continue to be posted as they are completed. Watch for Chapter 10 to be posted soon.
As always, your comments and suggestions are welcomed, Thomas
My interview on the Pelle Neroth Taylor show on Thursday, May 30, 2024 was recorded and is now available. My portion of the show can be heard here, and a transcript can be seen here.
This is a wide-ranging conversation about the problems with the present political system of money and exchange, and the decentralized exchange mechanisms that have been developing in parallel with it, including both commercial and grassroots currencies and credit clearing exchanges.
In this issue: * Chapter 8—The Separation of Money and State * Upcoming interview on TNT Radio * Six Lessons Learned About Community Currencies * Mutual Credit Panel Discussion * Symbiotic Culture ____________________ Readers have already seen the first two items in the posts below. Here are the remaining three items: ____________________ 6 Lessons Learned from 40 years of experimentation with local and community currencies.
Over the past several decades, many local and community currencies have come, and most of them have gone. By observing all that, and by my own research and experience with Tucson Traders and LETS Sonora, I’ve discovered several fundamental principles that have led me to the prescriptions I have been offering. Here is a partial list:
1. A community currency, to be truly effective, must be more than a local version of the existing political fiat currency. 2. A community currency must be created independently of the banking system. 3. A community currency can be created by local producers of real value in the form of vouchers that they can spend into circulation. 4. The amount of vouchers spent into circulation must not exceed the amount that an issuer is able to redeem by delivering goods and services within a few months’ time. 5. Such voucher currencies may wander away from the local community, but they must eventually return to the community to be redeemed by the issuer. 6. Voucher currencies must have an expiration date or demurrage fee to stimulate a healthy velocity of circulation, and to guarantee their timely redemption.
Zachary Marlow, founder of the Moneyless Society initiative, has recently posted the video of a panel discussion on mutual credit which he hosted several weeks ago. I was one of the panelists, along with Matthew Slater, Dil Green, and Matthew Schutte. You can view it on YouTube. ___________________ Birthing the Symbiotic Age
Here is something that is truly different from the way most of us are accustomed to thinking about positive social, economic, and political change.
Richard Flyer has been working for decades to facilitate the emergence of what he calls a “Symbiotic Culture.” Inspired in large part by his involvement with the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, Richard has been describing in his new book an “Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation.” The book, which is being published in sections, goes beyond theoretical reasoning or wishful thinking, it is a story or Richard’s journey of discovery and his real-world experience in acting as a catalyst to help that “new creation” to come about. In a recently published section titled, Chapter 7, Part 2, The Conscious Community Network and Local Food Ecosystem,Richard describes how the Northern Nevada Local Food System Network was able to emerge out of his one-on-one conversations with six “super connectors,” showing them how their common interests could be served by connecting their individual “silos” and cooperating for the benefit of all. He reports that, “Through these six people’s networks alone, we expanded the playing field for our food network to almost one hundred organizations and the fifty thousand people they were connected to!” In explaining the success of the network, Richard described it this way:
“A Symbiotic Network is not a separate organization. Instead, it is a community-wide, multi-hub, network-centric ecosystem — really an “organism” — where power is shared by the stakeholders.”
It’s a virtuous, purpose-based network for mutual benefit, where participants ask, “What can I give?” It’s not a fixed coalition where each organization only wants to “get” something.
It’s a unique “umbrella” or “meta-network” designed to enhance the work and provide tangible benefit to each member organization and the whole community – not just another competing silo.
It’s a completely independent network, not controlled by an existing non-profit, business, or local government.
It’s an informal consortium that connects and proliferates the good in a region in one or more multiple domains (e.g., around food, education, health care, neighborhoods, arts and culture)—not a formal organization with a formal board of directors, executive director, CEO, employees, and budget.”
I am confident that if you read or listen to all three sections of his Chapter 7, you will want to go back to the beginning of the book to hear the rest of Richard’s remarkable story. ____________ Wishing you a pleasant summer, Thomas
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. —Kenneth Boulding, Economist
Chapter Six — Usury, the Engine of Destruction, of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, new 2024 edition, is now available at Ken Richings; Substack channel, Future Brightly. in advance of its publication here on my website and elsewhere. Access to my work remains free, but please reward Ken for his good work by opting to take a paid subscription to his Substack channel. Further chapters will continue to be posted as they are completed on Future Brightly, and two weeks later on this and the other sites. Watch for Chapter Seven to be posted in about two weeks.
As always, your comments and suggestions will be welcomed, Thomas ___________________
Chapter 3, The Contest for Rulership—Two Opposing Philosophies. is now available. You can find it on my website, complete with end notes, along with previously published chapters 1 and 2. Click on the links below to access the text and the audio narration. Additional chapters will be posted as they are completed here. I expect to complete Chapter 4 and post it around the end of this year.
As always, your comments and suggestions will be welcomed, Thomas ___________________
The US dollar is rapidly losing its status as the global “reserve currency.” One after another, nations outside of the western coalition are waking up to the fact that dollars are needed only to pay for imports that come from the United States. In trades with other countries they are choosing to begin paying one another by using their own currencies, as reported in videos like this. They are recognizing that the real resources that they own are much more valuable than the empty promises that are embodied in inflated US dollars or other political currencies. The exploitation of weaker nations by the western powers that has been ongoing for centuries is coming to an end and the emergence of a multi-polar world order is now unstoppable.
The Bretton Woods agreement that established the post-war world financial order in 1944 was based on the promise that US dollars would be redeemed for gold at $35 an ounce. But the continuous debasement of the dollar over the years made that completely unrealistic, and ultimately its impossibility was formally recognized when President Nixon in 1971 “closed the gold window” and announced that the US government was reneging on that commitment. It would no longer give gold for dollars except at the prevailing market price. From that point on the fate of the dollar was sealed; it was just a matter of time. Despite the imposition of a series of extreme financial, economic, political, and military measures by the US and its western allies, time has run out on dollar dominance and the unipolar world order.
The main questions now are, 1) to what further extremes will the western empire resort in its desperate effort to forestall the inevitable political reordering, and 2) what sorts of new monetary and financial arrangements will be established to supplant the old Bretton Woods arrangement?
Regarding the first of these, the past several decades have seen a succession of both covert and overt interferences designed to weaken or neutralize monetary dissidents and potential political and economic rivals. Notable among the former have been Saddam Hussein, who in 2000 began selling Iraqi oil for Euros instead of dollars, and Muammar Gaddafi the Libyan leader who had plans to launch a pan-African currency called the Gold Dinar to free Africa from American domination. As a consequence, both men were murdered and their countries destroyed. Following the NATO invasion of Libya, and the murder of Gaddafi, then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, disgustingly and arrogantly boasted, “We came, we saw, he died!”
But nuclear armed Russia and China are not so easy to push around and brought to heel. When their Russian puppet Boris Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin to succeed him as prime minister, the globalist western oligarchs thought they could continue to rape Russia and exploit its vast resources for their own purposes. But Putin surprised them with his loyalty to “Mother Russia” and his unwillingness to betray the Russian people to the globalists. Whatever we in the west might think about the man, his stance has clearly endeared him to the Russian people.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the western powers promised not to move NATO farther to the east, but they have reneged on that promise, and one by one have brought the former Soviet republics into the western fold. [Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elaborated on this point in his recent speech and highlighted the importance of respect for Russia’s legitimate security concerns if ever there is to be peace]. Then, in 2014 the CIA engineered the overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine and replaced it with their own puppet government to further pressure the Russian government to play ball. The perceived existential threat of NATO weapons, even nuclear ones, on their very doorstep, was too much for Russia’s leadership to bear. It should have come as no surprise to anyone that the Russians reacted as they did to counter that threat by launching their “special military operation.” Putin had stated repeatedly that he hoped to negotiate a deal that would respect Russia’s national security interests but the US government has chosen to perpetuate the war in order to weaken Russia and force it to submit. Former nuclear weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, with his military experience and vast knowledge of the region provides a much more nuanced picture of that siltation than the biased sound bites one typically gets from the mainstream media.
Farther to the east, China a major economic, political and military power, has also balked at submitting to a New World Order in which the Western Empire calls all the shots. So now the globalist oligarchs who control the US government see China as a major obstacle to their plan for establishing a trans-human, technocratic utopia under the control of the elite Super Class. Hence, we see continual saber rattling, military and political provocations, and endless prating about the “Chinese threat.”
Regarding a new system of exchange and finance, I expect that we may soon see the emergence of a multilateral system for clearing credits among nations, one that will be more along the lines of the Bancor plan that John Maynard Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods in 1944. Not that Keynes should be the last word on the matter, but he at least proposed a way of preventing trade deficits from becoming perpetual as they are now, by imposing a levy (interest) on positive balances, as well as negative balances, that would seem to eliminate the debt trap. Professor Perry Mehrling provides a brief description of the Bancor plan in this video.
I expect eventually to see the complete depoliticisation of money and the broader application of credit clearing directly among buyers and sellers at the level of individual traders, as they have been doing for decades through the scores of commercial trade exchanges that have been operating around the world. Money is, after all, merely an information system about credits and debits that enables goods and services that are sold to pay for other goods and services that are bought. Further, the settlement of accounts will be done not only through reciprocal exchange, but also through cooperative support and forgiveness of debts, which will bring with it greater fairness and finally a peaceful world. Indeed, there may someday be a world government, but it will not be imposed by force, nor will it be the product of greed and materialistic human minds.
# # #
Addendum: In this excellent article, America Has Just Destroyed a Great Empire, Prof. Michael Hudson offers a history lesson that underlines the points I’ve made in my article.
Here is a small excerpt:
Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”
Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.
Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China. The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.
But that’s not the way it’s working out. Please read the full article.
What You Need to Know About Money. Currency, Credit, and Exchange
Abstract: There remains today, even among economists and “experts,” a general lack of understanding about the essential nature of money, currency and credit, and sound principles of their creation and management. This article provides a point-by-point summary of fundamental concepts and basic principles of exchange, it outlines the systemic defects and destructive nature of the dominant political, central banking, interest-based, debt-money system, and describes the ways in which honest and effective exchange media can be created on a decentralized basis outside of the banking system and in lieu of political money. A wider understanding of these points will lead to the widespread creation of honest exchange mechanisms and the devolution of financial, economic and political power that can change the course of civilization from self-destruction toward peace, justice, freedom and harmonious relationships.
The essential nature of money/currency A currency is a credit instrument, i.e., a promise to deliver valuable goods and/or services.
Basis of Issue A currency must therefore be issued into circulation on the basis of some value foundation, i.e., goods and/or services that the issuer is ready, willing, and able to sell immediately or in the near future.
Purpose of a currency The sole purpose of a currency is to facilitate the reciprocal exchange of value in the market. It is not a measure of value, nor is it a savings medium.
Reciprocal Exchange Reciprocal exchange is the voluntary exchange of one sort of value for another in the market.
Issuance A currency enters into circulation when a provider of value offers it to another seller who accepts it as payment for their own goods or services, i.e., it is spent into circulation, not sold for fiat political money.
Circulation If it is to serve as a currency, a credit instrument must circulate freely and can change hands many times before eventually returning to the issuer for redemption, not for political money, but for the goods or services that are the issuer’s stock in trade.
Redemption and Extinction A currency is redeemed and extinguished when the reciprocity circuit has been closed, i.e., when the issuer accepts it back as payment for the goods and/or services that they are prepared to deliver immediately or in the near term.
Liquidity Liquidity is quite simply the ability to pay, i.e., having a payment medium that is widely accepted.
Monetization Monetization is the process of converting the value of an illiquid asset into a liquid form, i.e., a form that can be used as a payment medium (money/currency).
Who is qualified to issue a currency? Since a currency is a promise to deliver value, only producers and providers of real value are qualified to issue a currency.
Fallacious myths about money
The belief that money must be issued and controlled by governments and/or central banks.
The belief that banks collectively should have a monopoly on the allocation of credit.
The belief that interest is a necessary element in money creation and finance. How is conventional political money issued, and who issues it?
Virtually all political fiat monies are created by banks when they grant loans.
What are the flaws in political money system, and what are their impacts?
Most bank loans are made on an improper, or inadequate, basis or foundation.
Government and central bank currencies are no longer defined in terms of any real concrete value unit.
Thus, most political money is illegitimate and dishonest.
The interest that banks charge on loans far exceeds the cost of providing the service of monetizing the value of the collateral assets. This causes debts in the aggregate to grow exponentially over time making it impossible for all borrowers to repay what they owe, and making it certain that some must fail.
The concentration of money power in the hands of ever larger banks, in collusion with central governments, concentrates financial, economic and political power in the hands of an elite “super class” and undermines democratic government.
Assertions and Prescriptions
To preserve any semblance of social justice, economic equity, individual freedom, and democratic government, power must devolve to people in their various communities. The only feasible way of achieving that is through the creation of independent and honest mechanisms for exchanging value.
Such honest mechanisms include private currencies issued by providers of real value, and credit clearing associations that allocate credit on a sound basis to producers of real value, and enable them to exchange value without reliance on bank borrowing or the use of political money.
Such systems are not new; they have long existed and need only to be optimized, standardized, and networked together to provide means of exchange that are locally controlled yet globally useful.
The future will see the proliferation of entities that organize and enable the allocation of interest-free exchange credit to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are the backbone of resilient and sustainable community economies.
Standard procedures and protocols for credit allocation and management will emerge that will allow the effective networking of those entities into a global “internet of exchange” using credit that is locally controlled but globally useful.
The first edition of my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, was published by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2009. While it remains as relevant today as it was when first published the printed book has been out of print for several years. But, having had the rights reverted to me by my publisher, I am making the entire book available for free in PDF format. You can read it or download it HERE. If you would like a hard copy of the first edition used copies can still be found on Amazon.com, Abe books, Thrift books and elsewhere.
Better still, you can avail yourself of the new revised and expanded 2024 edition which I have been working on for almost two years and is almost complete. Eighteen chapters have already been posted and can be freely read or download HERE.
To order signed copies of my previous books, click on the title below:
Beyond Money 